209). These positions are substantiated in this work with theoretical reflections on Jewishness, Zionism, and the political. The enquiry into these categories is made through a discussion of several major Jewish writers, including Emmanuel Levinas (chs 1-2), Walter Benjamin (chs 3-4), Hannah Arendt (chs 5-6) and Primo Levi (ch. 7). These interpretations are accompanied by analysis of works by Edward Said (ch. 1, ch. 8) and Mahmoud Darwish (ch. 8). The bringing together of these writers reflects Butler's indebtedness to two intellectual strands: postcolonial theory and Jewish thought. Out of the many close readings that her work offers, two concepts emerge as viable alternatives to the dominant political discourse: cohabitation and binationalism, which are based primarily on her reading of Levinas, Arendt, and Said.The main idea Butler draws from Levinas is that from the encounter with the face of the other emerges an ethical responsibility. She perceives this responsibility not merely as a precondition for the political, as it is often understood, but as emerging within the political (57). Butler intentionally reads "Levinas contra Levinas" in order to detach his thought from his Zionism and commitment to the State of Israel. Yet if the ethical indeed emerges within the political as Butler claims, it becomes all the more exigent to address Levinas' Zionism in order to understand the relation between what he considered a great event in modern Jewish history, namely the foundation of the State of Israel in 1948, and its ethical implications. Zionism for Levinas is a political idea that is grounded on the ethical and should be judged accordingly. It exemplifies the tension between the work of the state and the work of justice and therefore might contain injustice while at the same time striving, in its ideal form, to minimize the suffering of the other even at the price of sacrificing something of its own. This means that for Levinas there is a possibility of critiquing the State of Israel, while at the same time recognizing its importance and indispensability. This is a position Butler will unequivocally reject, which might explain why she does not deal with this aspect of Levinas' thought.Based on her understanding of Levinas, Butler locates an affinity between Arendt and Levinas. This affinity is based on the idea of cohabitation in Arendt's work, which is described by Butler as a condition "prior to any possible community or nation or neighborhood" (125). It is a situation one finds oneself in and may not withdraw from, similar to the face of the other in Levinas. Butler makes explicit the political implications of the
Shaul Magid's Meir Kahane: The Public Life and Political Thought of an American Jewish Radical (2021) stresses the American character of Kahane's thought. This review analyzes this claim in two ways. First, it offers a transnational perspective on Kahane's philosophy. Second, it examines Magid's concept of neo‐Kahanism in light of Kahane's legacy in Israel.
Are museums places about a community or for the community? This article addresses this question by bringing into conversation Jewish museums and Indigenous museum theory, with special attention paid to two major institutions: the Jewish Museum Berlin and the National Museum of the American Indian. The JMB’s exhibitions and the controversies surrounding them, I contend, allow us to see the limits of rhetorical sovereignty, namely the ability and right of a community to determine the narrative. The comparison between Indigenous and Jewish museal practices is grounded in the idea of multidirectional memory. Stories of origins in museums, foundational to a community’s self-understanding, are analyzed as expressions of rhetorical sovereignty. The last section expands the discussion to the public sphere by looking at the debates that led to the resignation of Peter Schäfer, the JMB’s former director, following a series of events that were construed as anti-Israeli and hence, so was the argument, anti-Jewish. These claims are based on two narrow conceptions: First, that of the source community that makes a claim for the museum. Second, on the equation of Jewishness with a pro-Israeli stance. Taken together, the presentation of origins and the public debate show the limits of rhetorical sovereignty by exposing the contested dynamics of community claims. Ultimately, I suggest, museums should be seen not only as a site for contestation about communal voice, but as a space for constituting the community.
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